Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 149 (October 2022): Lightspeed Magazine, #149

By John Joseph Adams

LIGHTSPEED is a digital science fiction and fantasy magazine. In its pages, you will find science fiction: from near-future, sociological soft SF, to far-future, star-spanning hard SF--and fantasy: from epic fantasy, sword-and-sorcery, and contemporary urban tales, to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folktales. 

Welcome to issue 149 of LIGHTSPEED! It's not easy getting a good meal, especially in space. And in our first SF short-Gene Doucette's "Primordial Soup and Salad"-the dinner situation on one spaceship gets, well, a little out of hand. If you like your science fiction with a side (dish) of humor, this one will definitely be to your taste. The SF continues more seriously with a new short from Adam-Troy Castro ("The Conflagration at the Museum of You"), a piece about aliens and yet also about the very human nature of mass shootings. P H Lee spins the story of a fallen civilization in their new flash piece, "The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad." We also have a reprint from Dexter Palmer ("The Daydreamer by Proxy"). Our first fantasy short takes us on a heart-breaking and transformative tour beneath the waves in "Apolepisi: A De-Scaling." Debbie Urbanski returns to our pages with a new novelette ("The Dirty Golden Yellow House") about a desperate, magical escape from a miserable marriage. Our flash piece is "The Three Books and What They Tell" from Alexandra Manglis, and our reprint is "Three Tales from the Blue Library," by Sofia Samatar. Of course our book team has been reading up a storm to find you some great book recommendations, and our author spotlight interviewer has sat down with all our short fiction writers to get more insight on their work. Our ebook readers will also get to enjoy a new excerpt from Kalyna the Soothsayer, a new novel from Elijah Kinch Spector.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adamant Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215374511

John Joseph Adams

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and the editor of the Hugo Award–winning Lightspeed, and of more than forty anthologies, including Lost Worlds & Mythological Kingdoms, The Far Reaches, and Out There Screaming (coedited with Jordan Peele).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Issue 149, October 2022

FROM THE EDITOR

Editorial, October 2022

SCIENCE FICTION

Primordial Soup and Salad

Gene Doucette

The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad

P H Lee

The Conflagration at the Museum of You

Adam-Troy Castro

The Daydreamer by Proxy

Dexter Palmer

FANTASY

The Three Books and What They Tell

Alexandra Manglis

Apolépisi: A De-Scaling

Suzan Palumbo

Three Tales from the Blue Library

Sofia Samatar

The Dirty Golden Yellow House

Debbie Urbanski

EXCERPTS

Kalyna the Soothsayer

Elijah Kinch Spector

NONFICTION

Book Review: The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo

Aigner Loren Wilson

Book Review: Eternally Yours, edited by Patrice Caldwell

Arley Sorg

Book Review: Across the Sand, by Hugh Howey

Chris Kluwe

AUTHOR SPOTLIGHTS

Gene Doucette

Suzan Palumbo

Adam-Troy Castro

Debbie Urbanski

MISCELLANY

Coming Attractions

Stay Connected

Subscriptions and Ebooks

Support Us on Patreon, or How to Become a Dragonrider or Space Wizard

About the Lightspeed Team

Also Edited by John Joseph Adams

© 2022 Lightspeed Magazine

Cover by Grandfailure / Adobe Stock

www.lightspeedmagazine.com

Published by Adamant Press

From_the_Editor

Editorial, October 2022

John Joseph Adams | 277 words

Welcome to Lightspeed’s 149th issue!

It’s not easy getting a good meal, especially in space. And in our first SF short—Gene Doucette’s Primordial Soup and Salad—the dinner situation on one spaceship gets, well, a little out of hand. If you like your science fiction with a side (dish) of humor, this one will definitely be to your taste.

The SF continues more seriously with a new short from Adam-Troy Castro (The Conflagration at the Museum of You), a piece about aliens and yet also about the very human nature of mass shootings. P H Lee spins the story of a fallen civilization in their new flash piece, The Tragic Fate of the City of O-Rashad. We also have a reprint from Dexter Palmer (The Daydreamer by Proxy).

Our first fantasy short takes us on a heart-breaking and transformative tour beneath the waves in Apolépisi: A De-Scaling. Debbie Urbanski returns to our pages with a new novelette (The Dirty Golden Yellow House) about a desperate, magical escape from a miserable marriage. Our flash piece is The Three Books and What They Tell from Alexandra Manglis, and our reprint is Three Tales from the Blue Library, by Sofia Samatar.

Of course our book team has been reading up a storm to find you some great book recommendations, and our author spotlight interviewer has sat down with all our short fiction writers to get more insight on their work. Our ebook readers will also get to enjoy a new excerpt from Kalyna the Soothsayer, a new novel from Elijah Kinch Spector.

It’s another terrific issue, so thanks for joining us!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy and is the bestselling editor of more than thirty anthologies, including Wastelands and The Living Dead. Recent books include A People’s Future of the United States, Wastelands: The New Apocalypse, and the three volumes of The Dystopia Triptych. Called the reigning king of the anthology world by Barnes & Noble, John is a two-time winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been a finalist twelve times) and an eight-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed and is the publisher of its sister-magazines, Fantasy and Nightmare. For five years, he ran the John Joseph Adams Books novel imprint for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Find him online at johnjosephadams.com and @johnjosephadams.

Science_Fiction

Primordial Soup and Salad

Gene Doucette | 9072 words

Wallace Englund, captain of the United Space Fleet vessel Caroline, stared out his private office window at the only view he’d had for nearly four years—outer space, in all its dull glory—and wondered why he couldn’t get a decent cheeseburger.

Behind him were the last three attempts at a burger made by the ship’s food replicator. The first looked okay until Wallace bit into it and discovered a soft, gelatinous interior that still tasted like a cheeseburger but whose texture made it impossible to ingest. The second was visibly worse: the left side of the burger looked like brown gravy, and not in a good way. The third came out perfect, up until Wallace touched the top of the bun, at which time it collapsed into a thick lumpy puddle.

Now lined up on his conference table like a surrealist Descent of Man, the indigestible catastrophes awaited an explanation from someone who knew how to tame a misbehaving food replicator.

The sensor above the door whistled.

Enter, the captain said, and in walked his ship’s chief engineer. There you are, Tandy. What took you?

Chief Engineer Tandy McKinnon looked tired. But, she always looked tired.

I don’t think the ship wants to make it to port, she said. Or if she does, she’d rather we weren’t alive for the experience. That’s my guess.

Anything critical?

Semi-critical. We lost life support on deck three for a minute and a half, but nobody had to hold their breath or anything. Didn’t even notice until the dioxide scrubbers sounded an alarm. You want a full accounting?

Save it for the end-of-shift report, he said.

Tandy looked at the parade of misbegotten cheeseburgers. What’s this? she asked.

"This is what happened when I tried to order lunch."

She leaned over to get a better look. Huh. How’d it taste?

That’s not the point.

Maybe you should ask for a cheeseburger soup, see what happens.

Tandy, he said, exasperated at her degree of levity. Self-evidently, something is amiss with the food replicator.

Computer, Tandy said, are the food replicators working?

The food replicators are functioning within normal parameters, Chief Engineer McKinnon, the computer said, in its usual annoyingly cheerful voice.

"She doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with them," Tandy said.

Yes, well the computer doesn’t eat, do you, computer?

You are correct, Captain Englund, the computer does not eat.

Come on, Tandy, what’s going on?

Tandy walked over to the replicator station built into the wall and ordered a glass of water. She sat back down at the table, studied the water for a moment, and then sipped it.

Tastes like water, she said.

That’s terrific, he said. I don’t want a glass of water.

Have you tried ordering something less complex?

Than a cheeseburger?

Meat, bread, cheese, lettuce, tomato, and condiments all with different textures. Plus the plate, right? It did fine with the water and the glass. How about a bowl of rice?

"I don’t want rice, Wallace said. I’d like for you to fix my replicator."

Tandy leaned back in the chair, as though the solution was on the office ceiling.

Honestly, yours isn’t the first complaint we’ve had about the replicators. It’s been happening off and on all over the ship for about a week. Best solution right now is to stick to something basic. Noodle and rice dishes still work fine, and beverages. I figure we can last six weeks on bland food.

Why is this the first I’m hearing of it? he asked.

I only report on serious-to-critical. Crew members not being able to eat exactly what they want when they want to is at best a minor problem.

Wallace barely resisted the urge to rage at length about how the captain deprived of a cheeseburger when he damn well wants one was not a minor problem. "What if this is an indication of something more serious?" he asked—a much more practical response. And what if it gets worse?

Like I said, we’re only six weeks out. We can make it on gruel if we have to.

"But Tandy . . . what if it gets much worse?"

She sighed and nodded. "Yeah. Okay. Here’s the thing: if there’s a problem with this replicator interface here? Like, it’s non-responsive or a completion sensor’s buggy? We know how to fix that. But if you’re talking about what’s going on inside the replicator? Well, I don’t know how it works. None of the engineers do."

That’s . . . that’s preposterous, Engineer McKinnon. There is no black box tech aboard this ship. That’s a USF mandate.

"I’m not saying it’s black box. I’m saying this technology has been in play for so long—working perfectly all this time—that nobody has firsthand experience with the inner workings. Hell, I can’t even find someone to explain how it does what it does. I mean, when you think about it, right? You ask for any food, any beverage, and boom there it is. With a plate and a glass and utensils spit from the same machine. How does that even make sense?"

You don’t know how to fix it.

"I wouldn’t know where to start, and I’m worried if I do start I’ll end up making it worse."

I see. Well. Before we commit to mucking about in the inner workings of a hundred-year-old technology we evidently lack the capacity to repair, I think you have some research to do.

Captain . . .

He got up from the table, which signaled the end of the meeting. Find the manual, he said. "Figure out how it works and then we’ll discuss the next steps. If you need some help understanding it, we do have a team of scientists on deck four. I’m sure they’d be happy to assist."

She sighed. I’d really rather not.

I’m aware. Ask one of them anyway.

She stood and performed something that managed to be both a salute and a gesture of insubordination. No promises, she said. In the meantime? I hear curry is still coming out okay.

• • • •

It wasn’t long before the ship’s replicators proved Captain Englund’s concerns well-founded.

At thirteen-oh-seven the following afternoon an ensign using a private quarters replicator asked for a corned beef Rueben and a glass of milk but instead received a cold fish taco and a glass of kerosene. An hour after that a lieutenant two decks away got a plate of olives and cinnamon in lieu of a Cobb salad. Most alarmingly, at fifteen-thirty-two in the fifth-floor commissary, one of the replicators produced something that looked like a badger with pigeon wings when it was supposed to be providing a roast chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy. According to five witnesses, the sort-of badger screamed for two seconds before dissolving into a puddle that smelled vaguely of strawberries.

The best Captain Englund could tell anyone was that the engineering team was working on it. This was true, but only in the sense that an active search was currently underway for the user manual.

It took Tandy and her team two days to find it. They began in the corporate memory banks, which contained all of the other ship systems manuals in digital form. What they found there was how to fix seventeen different versions of the replicator interface, which was not helpful; they already knew how to repair that.

Next came a deep dive in the back of the engineering room where the printed versions of the digital manuals lived, on a dusty shelf in a darkened corner. But not only was there nothing of use to be found, half of the manuals were for the wrong ship systems. (This was really okay, since the engineers always used the digital versions, and the print copy of the manual needed to repair the ship’s memory banks—in the event they were unable to access the digital files—was the correct one.)

The next step was to tell Captain Englund the manual didn’t exist. This did not work; he told them to go back and tear apart the room, floor-to-ceiling. The manual had to be there somewhere.

Remarkably, it was; they’d walked past it a dozen times. The full and complete manual for the ship’s Deluxe Food Replicator 3000 was a tome that was so massive and so useless that its current role and responsibility aboard the ship was to hold open the storage room door.

Then came two days of study, after which the engineering team’s grasp of the inner working of the replicator was sufficient in that they could explain the basics of it, but not much more. There was a troubleshooting section in the back that covered all kinds of potential issues—the favorite, by consensus, was in the event of inadvertent spontaneous combustion . . .—but nothing that matched what the Caroline was experiencing.

What they needed was a molecular biologist.

All of the scientists on deck four were molecular biologists, so there were plenty to choose from. Their job on this four-year mission was to find and study alien microbes and they were incredibly obnoxious about it . . . amazingly, given they’d yet to discover any aliens.

The engineers disliked the scientists because the scientists routinely talked down to the engineers. It was as though they thought a mole bio degree made them better equipped to repair a starship than a proper engineer. However, it was also the case that nobody appreciated it when the replicator food sat up and screamed, so after much debate and further urging from Captain Englund, Chief Engineer McKinnon took the massive manual and headed to the fourth deck, where she engaged the services of one Dr. Henrietta Kent.

It was a week before they were ready to report their findings. By then the problem had gone from an odd inconvenience to a full-blown emergency situation: fully half of the ship’s replicators now produced nothing but a high-pitched shriek regardless of the request, and the ones that still worked couldn’t be counted on to deliver the correct order for anything more complicated than plain oatmeal and a tepid glass of water.

Several of Wallace Englund’s crew were already on record as saying they’d prefer to walk out of the airlock without a suit than subsist on oatmeal and tepid water for the remainder of the journey. He felt much the same.

The Caroline did have a complement of DT-Rations, but as they were coming to